Is Private Property Threatened in America Today?

In the news this week are headlines such as “Harry Reid threatens private property in America” reporting on the attempt to ask NFL to pressure Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder to change the name of his team. Is private property truly being threatened in America today?

From America’s founding, private property not only offered the sole means of survival, but also laid the foundation for flourishing farms, families, communities, and, eventually, colonies. In this way, America had the unique opportunity of forming a distinct culture and complete way of life before it even became a nation, and this culture was based largely on private property. So when the Founders began designing a new government, they looked for what accommodated the freedoms and rights already in operation on American soil.

But the Founders went a step further.  A person’s property was sacred because it intertwined with his very personhood. To the Founders, “property” meant much more than land, houses, money, and material possessions. The full definition of property, wrote James Madison, “embraces everything to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to everyone else the like advantage.”

Thus, property includes:

• A person’s opinion and his right to communicate it freely.
• A person’s religious beliefs and his freedom to profess and practice them (conscience being “the most sacred of all property”).
• Personal safety and liberty, which, Madison notes, includes freedom from “arbitrary   seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest.”
• A person’s free use of his faculties (skills, talents, and abilities), choice of occupation, and the ability to earn and keep wealth. For, as Madison explains, “a just security to  property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species, where arbitrary taxes invade the   domestic sanctuaries of the rich, and excessive taxes grind the faces of the poor.”

“In a word,” said Madison, “as man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.” This is precisely why the Founders took property violations so seriously. A violation of one’s property is an assault on all his other rights. When the government is allowed to encroach on one individual right, it will inevitably encroach on all the others. Such a government is not just, and such a people are not free.

This week we are releasing the ninth segment in our Why America is Great series, “Private Property: Is It Mine or Thine?” Click here to download the full piece.